Floating Lily Pad City on a Water World
Early in my exploration of Blender in 2018 I managed to torture some shapes with modifiers into a floating "Lily Pad" conglomerate. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of learning how to change the properties of materials and watching the changes in light interplay. It was at this point I realized I could set the portview path tracing samples up higher than 32, and was able to remove that nasty noise by letting it sit for awhile longer. I only use screenshots to move into Photoshop because I can stack various portviews from studio, to matcap, to lookdev, and without any change of POV use the path tracing sample to top it off. This only works for a workflow directly into Photoshop of course but is perfect for single illustrations, my focus. So much to learn still!
Come Home Soon!
Blender and Soap Swirls, of course! I love photographing soap swirls and using them in Photoshop over my Blender renders.
Blender Lily Pad Floating City different POV
This was early in my Blender exploration, having not used 3d before, so I was mesmerized by how I could set up "Golden Hour" lights. What took me so long to try 3d?! :)
More experimenting with light and shadows over reflective vs rough materials. So much fun!
But here is the truest benefit to using 3d. . . changing the POV to Slug's Eye (what we called it in wet Seattle) or. . .
Bird's Eye! So much fun running the camera around through 3d shapes, like a giddy preschool kid!
The shapes I used to create the above water lily pads had wonderful gondola observation stations below. Someday I will revisit and add in the organic sea creature style ships I have been creating. . .
Revisiting using Eevee. The render is instant but the lights are not nearly as rich. But a few tweaks, plus using both cycles and eevee for the same POV, then stacked in Photoshop could be interesting. . .